Open Source / GPL

The OpenDocument Format (ODF) Alliance is highlighting today more forward progress for ODF. The public sectors in the Netherlands, South Africa and Korea have all recently taken steps to promote ODF as a standard for document exchange. Membership in the ODF Alliance, which was formed in early 2006 to promote the use of ODF in governments, is nearing the 500 mark, a pretty strong endorsement of the idea of open, standards based computing.

Funambol, the leading provider of mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source, today announced an important new release that extends the addressable market for its push email and PIM sync software. Funambol v6.5 includes push optimizations, multimedia content sync, greater scalability, broader device compatibility, online portal enhancements and improved Funambol clients. These enhancements make open source push email available for many more users and improves their mobile email & PIM sync experience.

While Eclipse percolates all over the Java world, ActiveState is betting that its dynamic language-focused IDE will fill an open source gap. The company's Komodo IDE 4.2 gave birth to a free version in February, Komodo Edit, but giving away the basic tools wasn’t enough. In October, Komodo Edit was repurposed and rereleased, as open source, under the Open Komodo project.

The University of Miami in the US has got together with the University of Dundee in Scotland to work with IBM on a project to develop open source software designed specifically to address the needs of older people, and help them to adapt to and remain productive in the 21st century workplace.

"The American Mathematical society has an opinion piece about open source software vs propietary software used in mathematics. From the article : "Increasingly, proprietary software and the algorithms used are an essential part of mathematical proofs. To quote J. Neubüser, 'with this situation two of the most basic rules of conduct in mathematics are violated: In mathematics information is passed on free of charge and everything is laid open for checking.'""

Enterprises are being offered the chance to use Facebook. Open source enterprise content management company Alfresco has integrated its application with the social networking site to enable its users to communicate more effectively with customers and partners. Alfresco claimed that it was the first Facebook application specifically developed for business users.

Pentaho Corp., creator of the world’s most popular open source business intelligence (BI) suite, today announced the availability of Pentaho Data Integration 3.0. The new release of Pentaho’s data integration product delivers significant performance enhancements, updated interfaces to improve ETL developer productivity, and a host of functional enhancements fueled by the company’s large and growing developer community.